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Martin Rundkvist's blog. Archaeology, skepticism, Sweden. And books and music and stuff.
Dr. Martin Rundkvist is a Swedish archaeologist, journal editor, public speaker, chairman of the Swedish Skeptics Society, atheist, lefty liberal, bookworm, and father of two.
Category: Food
I am making fårikål, a dish whose name has a kind of brutal literality, meaning "sheep in cabbage". It doesn't ring quite so harshly in Swedish, as we have no separate word for mutton, using the same word for...
Posted by Martin R at 10:51 AM • 19 Comments •
Category: Language
Dear Reader, please try saying "ENSKTBLEH". Yes, six consonants in a row. ENSKTBLEH. OK? Now sing it, loudly and happily. Go! I've spent three happy days at the first ever Picture Stone Symposium in Visby, listening to papers, moderating some...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Food
Is this what you see when you take it off?
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: China
My wife's from Zhejiang province, and so is this can of pickled cabbage that she bought yesterday. I like the label a lot. It's not quite Engrish: of course, we would say "people's mess hall", but the Chinese characters...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
A type of archaeological assemblage that occurs commonly in our house is the chicken or pork bone dump.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Food
Dismember a chicken and boil it in pan #1 until tender. Boil it with onion + carrot + garlic clove, all split, and bay leaf + salt. In pan #2, melt a few tablespoons of butter and whisk 0.4 dl...
Posted by Martin R at 8:29 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Biology
I've never picked the ink caps before as I knew that the Common ink cap is poisonous at least in combination with alcohol. But now I know better. The shaggies are always plentiful around here!
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 17 Comments •
Category: Biology
I can report that the hills between Lakes Lundsjön and Trekanten are rich in boletes right now.
Posted by Martin R at 2:25 PM • 7 Comments •
Category: History
And here's star philologist and religion scholar Ola Wikander with a guest lesson in Akkadian.The word of the day is nuḫatimmu. It means "a cook" in Akkadian (or sometimes "a baker"). Maybe something to interest Gordon Ramsay? And wouldn't...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Food
Christian fundamentalists like to believe that homosexuality is an illness that can -- and should -- be cured. The factual belief is contradicted by a solid scientific consensus, and the value judgement is widely considered to be a repressive...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 21 Comments •
Category: Humour
The Web helps you check if your ideas are original. Recently I've come up with two puns that proved to be unoriginal but still surprisingly uncommon. Ronald McDonald is the Lord of the Fries. The famous fantasy role-playing game should...
Posted by Martin R at 4:43 PM • 8 Comments •
Category: Food
We rarely buy bread. Instead I bake. Tonight's production involved a 5-day sour dough and a bag of roasted sunflower seeds. Pretty good, though I overestimated the amount of salt on the seeds and overcompensated. The sour dough was...
Posted by Martin R at 4:07 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Food
Writes Dear Reader Bruce Paulson of Gillett, Wisconsin:Your article the other day about rutabagas whet my appetite so on Friday I went to the local grocery store with a friend who was staying for supper. I unloaded three of them...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 10 Comments •
Category: Food
Everybody knows that English has borrowed the words ombudsman and smorgasbord from Swedish. But did you know that rutabaga is another Swedish loan? And that it was borrowed from a rural Swedish dialect, not standard Swedish? "Rutabaga" is an American...
Posted by Martin R at 1:19 PM • 17 Comments •
Category: Food
Today I did something that, had I been a truly rational consumer, I would have done 20 years ago. Fisksätra has two grocery stores. One is a big chain store and the other is a typical turkbutik, a mom'n'pop store...
Posted by Martin R at 8:22 AM • 10 Comments •
Category: Food
Part of the Swedish Christmas celebrations is that many people turn to traditional cooking. Yesterday my dad's wife & mine made sausages. They were really nice, way better than their limp and grey pre-cooking appearance suggested. But they were...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Biology
If yeast can make alcohol directly out of starch, why bother malting the barley before making beer?
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 17 Comments •
Category: Archaeology
In 1995 a gold hoard was found at Vittene in Norra Björke parish, Västergötland. Its contents had been amassed over two centuries, and it was committed to the earth in the 3rd century AD.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Travel
I type this in the hotel lobby while waiting for the train just across the street that will take me to Brussels. The conference closed at 13, I had sandwiches with my colleagues and then set out again for...
Posted by Martin R at 10:44 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Food
My wife and I made a short mushrooming excursion to Lake Lundsjön after lunch. Little more than half an hour in the woods garnered us only four species, but huge amounts of one: velvet bolete. We went home early...
Posted by Martin R at 10:57 AM • 4 Comments •
Category: Language
Here are two pieces of convoluted Scandy and English etymology that converge in my head.
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Blogging
The 6th Aardvarchaeology blogmeet was a friendly three-hour affair with good food, good drink and good company. 'Twas me, Kai, Mårten, Per G, Sigmund, Thinker and Tor, and an excellent time was had at Akkurat. Here's the historical record...
Posted by Martin R at 3:54 PM • 18 Comments •
Category: Food
I love black tea, and by that I mean brews from leaves of Camellia sinensis and C. s. assamica, nothing else, milk and sugar please. Earl Grey is basically Assam flavoured with oil of bergamot, a citrus fruit. It's OK...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 27 Comments •
Category: Food
Yesterday saw the season's first mushroom expedition. A bit early for real diversity, with only four edible species collected, but on the other hand we found quite a lot of chanterelles.Chanterelle, Kantarell, Cantharellus cibarius Birch bolete, Björksopp, Leccinum scabrum...
Posted by Martin R at 2:05 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: China
Courtesy of my niece-in-law in Hangzhou, here's a piece of plastic hong shao rou, 紅燒肉, red braised pork, intended as a cell phone decoration. Yum!...
Posted by Martin R at 4:21 PM • 4 Comments •
Category: Biology
Most psychoactive substances only occur in a small group of closely related plants. But caffeine pops up in widely divergent branches of the floral kingdom.
Posted by Martin R at 9:53 AM • 8 Comments •
Category: Skepticism
What newagers, health nuts and alties seem to be completely ignorant of is that both words originate in physics and that they refer to the same thing.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 15 Comments •
Category: Tree House Ruins
One of these men is an extremely zany comics artist and celebrated wit. The other is a stuffy scholar in an abstruse field. We've had a three-day holiday thanks to Friday being 1 May -- a red-letter day in...
Posted by Martin R at 3:20 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Food
There is a genre of complaints that I usually find a little silly: the Starbucks breakdown, which occurs when somebody's offered too many options. But now I've run into the problem myself. Yoghurt diversification. I buy most of our milk...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 5 Comments •
Category: Food
It looks like chocolate fudge cake. It tastes like compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. It is basically compact sour-dough rye bread and molasses. You have it at Easter, cold, with cream and sugar. It is a Finnish thing....
Posted by Martin R at 8:45 AM • 19 Comments •
Category: Food
When I give talks about Internet subcultures I like to say that I could devote the entire talk to on-line forums for retired Spanish-speaking transvestites. That's how niched groups a global communication network makes possible. Myself, I'm on a Swedish...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Food
Yesterday I made boiled pretzels from Horn, which are basically slightly sweet bagels.
Posted by Martin R at 8:21 AM • 10 Comments •
Category: Biology
Today we had eleven kinds, most of them hedgehogs and boletes.
Posted by Martin R at 9:15 AM • 16 Comments •
Category: Food
I'm in the Bangladeshi restaurant Dil Se having a nice chicken achari. I tried to get Orkney mutton, but it was only available on advance order. Seems fitting to have a curry even in this storm-swept outpost of the British...
Posted by Martin R at 4:40 PM • 6 Comments •
Category: Biology
Water suppliers use natural water to make tap water.
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 30 Comments •
Category: Photography
There's actually a use for onion peel. Wrap it around an egg, wrap egg and peel in aluminium foil, and boil the egg the usual way. Red onion peel dyes the shell yellow, while yellow onion peel dyes it...
Posted by Martin R at 8:20 AM • 11 Comments •
Category: Travel
I just popped out for a burger at Arbee's, and I chose a seat with a good view of the full moon riding high over a Shell gas station. On the wall of the station was a large luminescent...
Posted by Martin R at 6:53 PM • 9 Comments •
Category: Children
To get kids to eat veggies, hand them out while they play video games.
Posted by Martin R at 7:46 AM • 3 Comments •
Category: History
The elite talked about meat in French at the dinner table.
Posted by Martin R at 8:50 AM • 28 Comments •
Category: Food
The aroma is lemony sweet with a hint of savour from the beef tallow.
Posted by Martin R at 2:00 AM • 15 Comments •
Category: Food
Spotted Dick is a steamed, massive, doughy thing. It must be mine.
Posted by Martin R at 8:10 AM • 14 Comments •
Category: Humour
Dining with polyglot friends (he's a Sinologist who also works with Georgian and Basque and speaks a bewildering variety of Asian languages, she interprets Mongolian and speaks the most exquisite Swedish), my wife and I learned something about Mongolian...
Posted by Martin R at 9:05 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Food
My wife just hit me with some pretty heavy surrealism, suddenly handing me a foot-long yellow can of spicy Turkish chicken sausage. Her mother is visiting with us. The other day, this lady had an appointment with her acupuncturist...
Posted by Martin R at 2:19 PM • 13 Comments •
Category: Food
Here's one for Peezee....
Posted by Martin R at 12:11 AM • 3 Comments •
Orac 02.13.2012
Orac 01.26.2012
PZ Myers 02.02.2012
Jason Rosenhouse 02.12.2012
ERV 11.26.2011
